The furry South American creatures may hold the cure to AIDS; Flickr gave up on its plan to sell prints of Creative Commons photos after much criticism; meanwhile, Dick Cheney admits he has no problem with innocent people being tortured. These discoveries and more after the jump.

The Bush administration and the CIA tortured al-Qaida suspects because they wanted evidence that linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and could be used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Middle East expert Patrick Cockburn writes at The Independent.

Having so many drones flying around may have “serious implications” for journalists and researchers; India named its first “yoga czar”; meanwhile, a Fox News interview shows the holes in Dick Cheney’s defense of CIA torture. These discoveries and more after the jump.

With the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the use of torture by the CIA after 9/11, the final defense of the indefensible by its perpetrators, advocates and publicists is falling apart before our eyes.

The maimed veteran died last week after a desperate battle with the VA, which callously had reduced his pain medication. His crucible is familiar to the many other Americans who have become the fodder of our wars.

The recent television kerfuffle involving “Real Time” host Bill Maher and guest Sam Harris over whether Muslims are bad people because their religion is, in the words of Harris, “the mother lode of bad ideas,” is symbolic of the new American Islamophobia.

In what is hopefully not one of the seven signs of imminent apocalypse, former Vice President Dick Cheney once again darkened the halls of Congress on Tuesday, huddling with House Republicans to strategize about the simmering war zone that is Iraq. Yes, it is 2014 and not 2004.

Likely leaders of a Hillary Clinton administration are helping hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer wring hundreds of millions of dollars out of Argentina, a move that could derail the country’s long climb back into solvency and undermine debt settlements worldwide.

Once upon a time, if a character on TV tortured someone, it was a sure sign that he was a bad guy. Now, the torturers are the all-American heroes. From “24” to “Zero Dark Thirty,” it’s been the good guys who wielded the pliers and the waterboards. We’re not only living in a post-9/11 world, we’re stuck with Jack Bauer in the 25th hour.

Former vice president and unindicted felon Richard Bruce Cheney (they always give the criminals’ names that way, in full) once said that he was sure that the Sunni Arab resistance to the U.S. in Iraq was in its last throes.

When I read the statistics on Americans and Britons that approve of torture, a scene comes back to me. I remember a man I met 20 years ago, not in my native Latin America or in faraway lands where torture is endemic, but in the extremely English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently declassified documents on CIA torture during the Bush administration, inspiring the “Daily Show” host to take us on a “stroll down ‘things we’d like to erase from our memory’ lane.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has lambasted the Obama administration for its announcement that it will cut 8 percent out of the military budget and reduce standing army troop levels to their lowest since before World War II.

By invading Iraq, Bush administration policymakers—and at their head, Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—had managed to demonstrate to the world not the grand extent of American power but its limits.

A Dutch man has a prosthetic connected to his nerves, which allows him to feel pressure; Harvard alumni will have exclusive access to some massive open online courses offered by the university; meanwhile, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s legacies live on. These discoveries and more after the jump.

As the world mourns Nelson Mandela’s death, it also should take a clear-eyed look at his life and the world in which he struggled—and remember those who aligned with the racist apartheid regime of South Africa.

Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other “Left, Right & Center” panelists discuss a procedural rule change in the U.S. Senate that would allow a majority vote on judicial and executive appointees, other than for the Supreme Court.